The mystery of the swans

It is not often that you see swans swimming on the open sea but here are a family swimming on the edges of Belhaven Bay at high tide. You can see a bit of a sand bar behind them but this only partially blocks off the bay. Normally they only swim as far as the mouth of the river, the Bielwater as it opens out into the sea but today they have ventured right out into the bay. There is a mystery about this swan family as they disappear during the daytime, presumably up river but it is not apparent where they originally nested.

For a couple of months I had been observing (and blipping ) a pair that had nested on the edge of Seafield Pond which is very close by but not attached to the river and the bay. All of a sudden these swans disappeared and I thought the eggs had failed to hatch. However, a day or so later these swans appeared right down at the mouth of the river with some cygnets. They were too far away for me to recognise if they were the same pair and in any case I did not see how they could possibly have transported day old cygnets across to the river. In their current habitat the cygnets have all grown quite healthily whereas the pair which were on the pool last year lost all but one of their cygnets to predators. So I will probably never know if this is the same family miraculously transported to a safer environment but it was nice to see them a bit closer at hand tonight.